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Introduction
Current institution
Publications
Publications (15)
The pandemic changed people's lives and came with enormous restrictions on personal freedom, greatly restricting people's sense of agency. In response, people oscillated between fear and anger. We show (N = 2125) the ways in which people restored their perceived agency that was taken away by restrictions and that affective reactions to the pandemic...
Social bots, employed to manipulate public opinion, pose a novel threat to digital societies. Existing bot research has emphasized technological aspects while neglecting psychological factors shaping human–bot interactions. This research addresses this gap within the context of the US‐American electorate. Two datasets provide evidence that partisan...
Psychological reactance is a motivational state that leads people to regain threatened or lost freedoms. It is accompanied by anger and negative cognitions and causes various effects such as resistance, aggression, and increased attractiveness of the original freedom. Despite a wealth of studies exploring the causes and consequences of reactance, t...
Social bots that aim to distort public opinion represent a novel threat to digitalized societies. Current bot research has largely prioritized technological issues and left out psychological factors related to ordinary online users. The present research addresses this gap and adds to a growing literature that emphasizes the role of partisan-based m...
PLUSTRACK ist ein Projekt der Universität Salzburg mit dem Ziel, ein Community -Netzwerk für Studierende aufzubauen. Durch eine bessere soziale Vernetzung soll der Studieneinstieg erleichtert und Studierenden darüber hinaus geholfen werden, in herausfordernden Studiensituationen Unterstützung zu finden. Studie-rende werden hierzu durch verschiedene...
First-generation students (FGS) are more likely to feel misplaced and struggle at university than students with university-educated parents (continuous-generation students; CGS). We assumed that the shutdowns during the Coronavirus-pandemic would particularly threaten FGS due to obstructed coping mechanisms. Specifically, FGS may show lower identif...
Over the recent years, research in the field of threat and defense has accumulated evidence on how encounters with various psychological threats influence human behavior, cognition, motivation, affect, and health. Unifying different theoretical threat models, the General Process Model of Threat and Defense claims that different threatening concerns...
The COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted everyday life virtually everywhere in the world, enabling real-life research on threat-and-defense processes. In a survey conducted within the first days of implementing social distancing measures in Austria and Germany, we aimed to explore the pathways from threat perception to preferences of defense strategie...
To better understand individual responses to psychological threats and their effects on individual and societal outcomes, we suggest approaches to classify and categorize psychological threat. We use both a theoretical and data-driven approach (n1 = 239, n2 = 144) to disentangle the threat landscape, and discuss commonalities and differences betwee...
People with strong (vs. moderate) political attitudes have been shown to exhibit less phasic reactivity to perceptual anomalies, presumably to prevent their committed meaning systems from being challenged by novel experiences. Several researchers have proposed that (but not tested whether) firmly committed individuals also engage in more attentiona...
Zusammenfassung
In der gegenwärtigen Arbeitswelt müssen Organisationen in der Lage sein, sich schnell auf neue Marktanforderungen anzupassen. Mitarbeiter werden jedoch von organisationalem Wandel oft belastet. In diesem Artikel beschäftigen wir uns mit den impliziten negativen emotionalen und motivationalen Reaktionen auf organisationalen Wandel so...
The current social and political situation in virtually the entire Western world is tense: News of terrorism, conflict, and wars increases the salience of mortality reminders in everyday life. Terror management theory proposes that individuals defend themselves from existential terror by defending their ingroup and its values. We propose a cycle mo...
